Monologisation as a Quoting Practice

Abstract

This paper explores a particular aspect of journalistic quoting, monologisation. During monologisation, the interactive turn exchange between the journalist and the interviewee is simplified for the article, which is mainly conducted by obscuring the role of the journalist in the original spoken discourse. As a result, the quotations appear to be unprompted, continuous utterances by the interviewee, which in turn has seminal consequences for the interpretation of the quotation. This paper will demonstrate that monologisation is an effective means for journalists to steer the reading of the article and to include their own points of view without breaking the professional rule that journalism must separate facts from opinions. The results of this study are based on a comparison between two types of empirical data; recordings of journalistic interviews on the one hand, and published articles on the other. This study will focus on one particular type of journalistic interview that has been largely neglected in prior research along with its specific quoting practices: The interviews were conducted by the journalists in order to collect raw material for written journalistic items, published either in print or electronic form. This paper will show that interviews of this type involve highly diverse and mutually adaptive interaction, contrary to the clearly structured question-answer interviews that are used as sound bites in television news items and have thus far remained the primary focus of research on both journalistic interviews and quoting processes. The notion of monologisation could be applied in various domains where an interview is converted into a written account, such as research interviewing and police interrogations.

Problematising the restoration of trust through transparency: Focusing on quoting

“…In other words, transparency has become an increasingly important aspect of journalism that authenticates a claimed professional role, and revealing the real practices might threaten this legitimacy. Among other mechanisms, for example impression management (Goffman, 1959) would discourage journalists from telling their audience that they combined utterances from two or more different places in an interview in order to produce one single quote (Haapanen, 2017a: 23); that they reformulated their interviewees’ unshaped and meandering chit-chat into concise, unambiguous quotes (Haapanen, 2016: Section 4.5); or that on one occasion they had asked an interviewee, ‘Was it a hard situation to accept?’, received the answer ‘Yes’, and then written a direct quote in which the interviewee says, ‘It was hard to accept‘ (Haapanen, 2017b: 9–12).…”

“…However, recent production-oriented research on journalistic quoting in a written format (e.g. Havumetsä, 2020; Kuo, 2007; Matsushita, 2016, in press; Nylund, 2006; Satoh, 2001), to which my series of studies (Haapanen, 2011, 2016, 2017a, 2017b, 2017c, 2018, 2020; Haapanen and Perrin, 2019) makes a not inconsiderable contribution, has revealed that the relationship between original interview discourse 2 and the published quoted discourse is by no means so simple and simplistic. To begin with, there is no absolute correspondence between sound waves in the air and graphemes on paper or on screen, and several features of oral communication, such as prosody, do not have any apparent equivalence in writing – if any at all.…”

“…The material was originally in Finnish but has been translated into English by the author. (For details about the data used in the first two subsections, see Haapanen, 2017a, and in the third subsection, see Haapanen, 2020. Some parts of the analyses have been reproduced from these publications without explicit cross-references.…”

Political Journalism Content in a New Era: The Case of Finnish Newspapers, 1995–2015

“…Its reporting style marks a different approach to the two dailies where journalists’ authorial presence is more clearly visible. The latter approach has been found more commonly in Finnish journalism (Haapanen, 2017; Reunanen and Väliverronen, 2020), and from 2010 to 2015, IL also changes towards it.…”

Overcoming methodological challenges in text production research: a holistic approach through data triangulation

“…Research in applied sciences is typically triggered by a real-life problem. In my example, which draws on my research project on journalistic quoting (Haapanen 2016a(Haapanen , 2016b(Haapanen , 2016c(Haapanen , 2017a(Haapanen , 2017b(Haapanen , 2018, without explicit cross-references, the trigger was an evident contradiction that appeared between institutional metadiscourse about quoting on the one hand, and actual quoting practices described in existing research on the other. The former, presented in guidebooks, editorial policies and self-regulatory guidelines, presumes that the quoted text is a fairly exact reproduction of what a source used as a text agent has said -if not wordfor-word, then at least in a meaning-for-meaning way.…”